How Britain became a cycling nation

The Tour de France and Olympic golds are well within the grasp of British riders, and nearly two million of us are now regular cyclists. Yet a decade ago, this was a minority pursuit. So what has changed?

Bradley Wiggins during the 11th stage of the 99th Tour de France: seven years ago there wasn't a single Briton competing in the event. Photograph: Stephane Mahe/Reuters

How Britain became a cycling nation

The Tour de France and Olympic golds are well within the grasp of British riders, and nearly two million of us are now regular cyclists. Yet a decade ago, this was a minority pursuit. So what has changed?

Saturday 14 July 2012 06.49 EDT
First published on Saturday 14 July 2012 06.49 EDT

Bradley Wiggins and his team-mate Chris Froome are odds-on to win the Tour de France when it finishes in Paris next Sunday, holding first and second place with a week to go, but amid the celebration one salient fact could go unnoticed: seven years ago, in 2005, there was not a single cyclist from these shores in the race. The dramatic rise of British cyclists riding for a British team to dominate the toughest race in the cycling calendar is the mirror image of a sport and pastime that has boomed in the last few years, whether you measure it by medal count, participation or cash spent on bike bling.

The Tour de France is the start of what could be the perfect summer for cycling, on the results side if not in terms of the weather for actually being in the saddle. The dream scenario for the men who run the sport in Britain would be that, six days after Wiggins or Froome wins the Tour de France, the reigning world road race champion Mark Cavendish sprints up the Mall to win the opening event in the London Olympic Games, the men's road race. The script climaxes the following week with a rush of medals at the London Velodrome, building on the track cycling team's dominance in Beijing in 2008. New national heroes then emerge to act as flagbearers alongside Cavendish – BBC Sports Personality of the Year in 2011 – Wiggins, Sir Chris Hoy and Victoria Pendleton.

Those who underestimate cycling have only to stand by the side of a major road leading to the centre of London at rush hour and watch the endless stream of bikes passing as commuters beat congestion on the tube, or see the hordes who watch the Tour of Britain each September (official crowd figures topped a million in 2011). Cycling is no longer at the margins and this summer's events will help it grow further, in terms of participation and economics.

British Cycling's membership has doubled since 2008 to 50,000, while Sport England's latest participation survey suggests nearly two million people currently cycle at least once a week. That's reflected in the buoyant state of the cycle industry. A joint report by British Cycling and the London School of Economics in August last year estimated that as a pastime and industry it is worth £2.9bn to the national economy. Their estimated spend of £230 per cyclist will make any two-wheeled widow smile wryly: the most expensive top-end racing bikes cost as much as a small car, so that might just about cover a pair of brakes.

The LSE figure is borne out by a simple rule of thumb: visit any major cycle event or do a quick commuter count, estimate the value of the bikes within view, and extrapolate. Or you could compare the magazines I edited in the 1990s with their editions now, in terms of page count and advert count. This summer, retailers suggest that mid-range bike sales have been hit hard by the poor weather – one shop reported in June that its top-selling clothing line was winter overshoes – but in 2010 and 2011, the market in high-end bikes, those costing more than £5,000, was more than bucking the recession.

"The massive difference in the last three years is the number of serious, first-time buyers – that's increased enormously. There is a huge increase in people buying a first serious bike, costing £1,000 or more, it's more than doubled," Phil Weaver, who runs Shropshire-based Epic Cycles, told me. The classic pattern, according to Weaver, is that cyclists begin with a commuter bike, buy a low-to-mid-range road bike, get hooked, then look to the top end of the market.

The rise and rise of cycling can be traced back to two coaches, Peter Keen and Dave Brailsford and one event: the Barcelona Olympic Games in 1992, when Chris Boardman won the gold medal in the individual pursuit, Britain's first cycling gold since 1920. That created massive short-term hype, but nothing concrete for five years, until Boardman's trainer Peter Keen sat down and wrote a long-term plan for the sport in order to attract funding from the National Lottery: Boardman's gold, and the bronze he won in Atlanta, indicated that British cyclists could compete on the international stage if well resourced. But by then the sport was in crisis, the governing body had been riven with dissent and members had deserted in droves. Major sponsors had disappeared and while Boardman had won a time trial in the Tour de France, he was the only Briton in the race.

Keen's plan seemed outlandish: he proposed the funding be directed mainly at track cycling and women's racing. These, he suggested, were areas where medals could be won in the short term, attracting more funding and creating a virtuous cycle of forward progress. There was an outcry from traditionalists, offended partly by the fact he was only intending to fund teams in road racing – the most prestigious and popular side of the sport – as part of preparation for track racing. Keen also felt that, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the professional road side was riddled with drugs and it would be unethical to launch young riders into that milieu. The diehards also hated the lime-green jerseys that Keen's national team wore, briefly, to mark a complete break with the past.

His vision bore fruit almost immediately, with Jason Queally's gold medal in the kilometre time trial at the Sydney Olympics, where Hoy and a 20-year-old Bradley Wiggins were also among the medallists. The momentum continued at the Athens Games, where Wiggins and Hoy both took gold. But as the track cyclists flourished, the road racers were nowhere: Boardman had retired in 2000, and his apparent successor, David Millar, was busted for drugs in 2004 and banned. (He has since returned, reinventing himself as an anti-doping campaigner, and on Friday won a stage of the current tour.) In 2004 and 2005, there was not one British cyclist in the Tour de France.

The key years were 2007 and 2008. By then Keen had moved on, succeeded by Brailsford, who ran the sport along the same lines as Keen, but with a key twist: Brailsford was a road racer at heart, a would-be pro before turning his attention to business. In 2007, when the tour started in London, the first products of the Great Britain cycling academy – run by a passionate young coach, Rod Ellingworth – were coming through, led by Mark Cavendish, and Brailsford had spotted the potential for a British-based professional team. The talent was there, he felt, but the sport was clearly changing, with stricter testing pushing drug taking increasingly to the margins. Young British cyclists no longer had to face the ethical minefield that had ensnared Millar.

Beijing in 2008 saw Brailsford's cyclists dominate with eight golds; James Murdoch's Sky had come on board as a major sponsor for the Olympic team just before the Games and by 2009 they were lined up to back the pro team project. Serendipitously, that same year Wiggins achieved his breakthrough performance in the tour, finishing fourth after finally paying his full attention to the road after his years of concentrating on the track at the Olympic Games. At the same time, there had been a massive boom in participation at grassroots level, fuelled largely by the emergence of the Mamil: Middle Aged Men in Lycra, able to commit time and money to pursuing their passion, largely mass-participation events based on the format of the Etape du Tour, in which leisure riders get to cycle the route of a stage of the great race.

At the top of the tree, in 2011, British pro cyclists won a record 46 races, partly spurred by Team Sky's formation, but also because of Cavendish's rise to dominate the mass sprints that decide many professional events. The highlight was Cavendish's victory in the world professional road race championship, a feat no Briton had managed since 1965. It was a team performance of striking dominance – confirmation that Keen's goal of making Britain the world's top cycling nation had been achieved – masterminded by Ellingworth in a two-year campaign that bore echoes of Sir Clive Woodward's single-minded march towards the 2003 Rugby World Cup.

Unlike Woodward's players, Britain's cyclists have kept going, without a pause for breath. In February 2009, Brailsford had stated his goal of winning the Tour de France with a British cyclist. It was met with widespread scepticism. That is now within reach, whether or not it happens this year. Asked what he would do next if it were to happen, whether he might feel he had nothing else to achieve, he had no hesitation: "Win it again. And again." After this July, few would gainsay him. And looking back further, the original visionary, Peter Keen, wrote in an early Olympic plan that he felt Britain had to aim to be the number one cycling nation in the world. That looked outlandish, but, again, it is perfectly on the cards.